I'm recording an album - it sounds like a singular thing.  It leads people to think that there will be a full complete album right away.  It takes a lot of time, at least for me.  An album is not only a record (a documentation) of music performances, it is also a record of decisions made.  A single album is composed of hundreds of decisions.  And if you haven't finished all of the songwriting decisions before you start recording, then those decisions are stacked on top of all of the recording decisions…

Wow, almost two months since my last post!  It was not for a lack of ideas that I did not write anything, but rather a lack of taking a moment to reflect and put my hands on the keyboard.  Time passes very quickly and we often don't recognize that without some type of marker like a major life event or remembering how long it has been since a significant event occurred.

I used a walking metaphor in my previous post, pointing out that it's up to you to decide what is good or bad about the things you…

It may sound strange, but one of the biggest mistakes I made as an aspiring songwriter was worrying too much about how well I was playing and writing.  I was afraid to write songs that weren't good.  When it comes to mastery of an instrument and preparing for public performance, you definitely should worry about how well you're playing and performing.  You don't want to get in front of an audience unprepared and sound like you're just banging out noise (unless that's your objective).  But just like…

One year ago this month I released my first album which is available on CDBaby https://store.cdbaby.com/albumDetails.aspx?AlbumID=johnellis7 .  It's been interesting to watch the statistics and see places around the world where the songs have been played (plus or minus the geographic accuracy of the tracking data).  Despite being available worldwide, it doesn't mean that songs will be listened to by a lot of people.  I've learned how important promotion is in the effort to get a song heard.  Word of mouth…

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I have just recently finished recording the song…